[Westwales] Debian and firewire drives

[John Bailey]

>  But this is where the problems start - Debian apparently doesn't play well 
> with firewire hard drives, so when I got to the "select a disk" part of the 
> installation procedure, the only option was the internal hard drive... and 
> I'd rather avoid having to wipe that and reinstall everything later.

That'd be the installer, which is supposedly much better in the upcoming 
release.  I'm afraid I've never actually installed 3.0 (I've just 
continually upgraded older versions), but somewhere in the install you 
should have the option of installing additional device drivers.  You need 
to install the firewire driver (ieee1394), which I'd presume isn't loaded 
by default.  After that, you should see the firewire drive show up as a 
SCSI device.

Of course, 3.0 is ancient by now, so it might be that it doesn't include 
firewire support (or at least not for your device).  In which case I'd 
suggest downloading a boot iso (usually about 40Mb ish - take a look at 
<http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/> - look at the 'netinst' CD 
images) from a more recent version, then doing a network install to save 
having to burn 4 more CDs.

Have Fun,

John